September 2006 — Features
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Formative Assessment :: Building a Better Student
After receiving training from Scantron, administrators and teachers immediately bought into the system, which Carson says was important. “You need district assessment of the software to make sure it’s going to work,” he says. The staff’s faith was justified when it began to get feedback from the tests. Harris says that in some cases, teachers had totally misjudged which standards students were meeting. “It’s helping,” he says. “It’s giving my teachers more information.”DOES YOUR ASSESSMENT TOOL PASS THE TEST?
The US Department of Education says it does if it can perform these five key functions:
- Get the right data. Assessments should be valid, reliable, and interpretable.
- Get the data right. Data should be gathered and disaggregated accurately.
- Get the data right away. Reports should be made available as quickly as possible.
- Get the data the right way. Data should be assessed electronically to provide for easy viewing at the classroom, school, and district levels—by grade, by subgroup, by course, by class, by staff member, and by individual student.
- Get the right data management. A single, centralized interface should be used for the most efficient data management.
‘Change Is a Process’
Journeying to the land of Disney—Orlando, FL—we find Lee Baldwin, senior director of accountability, research, and assessment at Orange County Public Schools. Baldwin has his district using the Edusoft Assessment Management System and content developed by The Princeton Review.
You might have thought The Princeton Review was a sophisticated literary journal published in New Jersey. Nope. It’s a New York City-based provider of some of the largest formative assessment programs in the country, having generated more than 10 million assessments and 1.5 million reports since 2000. Sloane O’Neal, vice president of sales and marketing, says the company offers tests for school districts that use all kinds of platforms, not just its own, which is called the Homeroom Assessment Center. The Princeton Review designs tests, delivers them either online or offline, and provides reports and psychometric evaluations.
But back to Orlando and Lee Baldwin. Baldwin wanted a centralized, consistent assessment of the students in his district, primarily to adhere to No Child Left Behind and Reading First requirements. Orange County now administers formative assessments in math and reading, and it’s moving toward doing the same for science. The districts prints out its own answer sheets, students mark them, the answer sheets are scanned optically, the images are uploaded to a website, and then the results are posted on the site. Teachers test in the morning and get their results by the afternoon. “It’s virtually instant feedback,” Baldwin says.
